Articles Tagged "Jeff Kuhn"

Solar scientists are finally overcoming their fears and going public about the Sun-climate connection

Four years ago, when I first started profiling scientists who were global warming skeptics, I soon learned two things: Solar scientists were overwhelmingly skeptical that humans caused climate change and, overwhelmingly, they were reluctant to go public with their views. Often, they refused to be quoted at all, saying they feared for their funding, or they feared other recriminations from climate scientists in the doomsayer camp. When the skeptics agreed to be quoted at all, they often hedged their statements, to give themselves wiggle room if accused of being a global warming denier. Scant few were outspoken about their skepticism.

No longer.

Scientists, and especially solar scientists, are becoming assertive. Maybe their newfound confidence stems from the Climategate emails, which cast doomsayer-scientists as frauds and diminished their standing within academia. Maybe their confidence stems from the avalanche of errors recently found in the reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, destroying its reputation as a gold standard in climate science. Maybe the solar scientists are becoming assertive because the public no longer buys the doomsayer thesis, as seen in public opinion polls throughout the developed world. Whatever it was, solar scientists are increasingly conveying a clear message on the chief cause of climate change: It’s the Sun, Stupid.

Jeff Kuhn, a rising star at the University of Hawaii’s Institute for Astronomy, is one of the most recent scientists to go public, revealing in press releases this month that solar scientists worldwide are on a mission to show that the Sun drives Earth’s climate. “As a scientist who knows the data, I simply can’t accept [the claim that man plays a dominant role in Earth’s climate],” he states.

Solar scientists worldwide are working to disprove the hypothesis that man is primarily responsible for climate change, according to Dr. Jeff Kuhn, Associate Director of the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawaii. In the view of Dr. Kuhn and other top scientists, the Sun changes Earth’s climate. “As a scientist who knows the data, I simply can’t accept (the claim that man plays a dominant role in Earth’s climate),” he states.

Dr. Kuhn last week announced breakthrough research on the role of the Sun – after years of precise satellite measurements, undistorted by Earth’s stratosphere, he and his team discovered that the Sun did not change much in size, as has generally been believed. Rather, the Sun is surprisingly stable, its diameter changing by less than one part in a million during the last 12 years.

Dr. Kuhn’s team, which includes scientists from Stanford University in California and Universidade Estadual de Ponta Grossa in Brazil, used NASA’s SOHO satellite to obtain resolutions 10 times better than telescopes on Earth, allowing them to measure the Sun’s diameter of approximately 865,000 miles to an accuracy of a few hundred feet. In 2017, when the world’s most powerful telescope -- his institute’s Advanced Technology Solar Telescope -- starts operating on Hawaii’s Mt. Haleakala's summit at a resolution 10 times better still, he expects to zero in on details that unravel the mystery of how minute changes on the Sun’s surface affect climate on Earth. NASA’s SOHO satellite revealed that 100 metre high bumps 90,000 kilometres apart cover the Sun’s surface. With his new telescope, Dr. Kuhn expects to capture never-before-seen details of the solar surface.

“We can’t predict the climate on Earth until we understand these changes on the sun,” concludes Kuhn.